Nearly two years after being approved by the Food and Drug Administration, DEKA has a manufacturer and could change people's lives as early as 2016.
Created by inventor Dean Kamen and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the LUKE arm offers a level of dexterity and flexibility almost unheard of in prosthetic technology. LUKE features motors at the shoulder, elbow, and hand.
The result is a full prosthetic arm or forearm that can do things that many others can't. The LUKE Arm, for example, allows users to reach above their heads, lift relatively heavy objects off the floor, and manipulate thin, rougher objects with relative ease.
It also features a two-way communication system. Electrodes allow the user to control the movements of the LUKE Arm with muscle movements, and the device transmits information to the user via a grip force sensor.
After completing clinical trials with over 100 amputees, the LUKE arm will be sold by DEKA Mobius Bionics, LLC, and manufactured by Universal Instruments Corporation.
“Working one-on-one with amputees and learning what they liked and didn’t like about using their prosthetics proved invaluable to our product development process. Thanks to their insight and input, we will be able to build the most advanced FDA-cleared design the world of upper limb prosthetics has seen to date,” Kamen said in a statement.
While it's quite advanced, the LUKE Arm isn't the only next-gen prosthetic technology on the horizon. In 2014, researchers in Sweden successfully attached a groundbreaking prosthetic to a person's body through a technique known as osseointegration, which actually fuses the arm to the user's bones and creates a more direct interface between the amputee's muscles, nerves, and the prosthetic arm.
There's still no word on how much a LUKE Arm will cost, but it's sure to be quite a pricey one. In contrast, a 3D-printed arm, which is nothing like this sophisticated, can cost as little as $50.
